No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi listeners welcome to no priers today we have Ivan Z co-founder and CEO of notion the Beloved productivity application for notes tasks and knowledge base they recently launched an AI Q&A interface as well as a calendar application we're super excited to have Ian thanks for being here again Ivan uh we are going to start with the hardest question which is what is notion Notions always pretty hard to Define because can do so many different things um but that's also our goal we want to give people one tool that they can do their most work with for personal user that means all your personal notes all the planning for a trip for for your wedding for business for Enterprise for company that means all your documents all your task all your issues calendaring knowledge basing in one tool um the reason we want to do that because just's just so much fragmentation in the market today we wish like it wouldn't be nice as one place to do your most work and the our approach here is rather than trying to cram all of use cases into one product uh what are the underlying software building blocks what are the Legos that power those use cases can we give users those Legos so they can be creative with software themselves they can create and Tinker their perfect workflow for their personal life or for their company and none of this is new by the way like people back in the 80s even' 70s tried this kind of building blocks approach to software we're just trying to take a modern spin with cloud and with AI uh to what it's like to break the prison of application based software it's dramatic to think we've been living in a prison of SAS fragmentation the last two decades but I I do think it's actually um uh you know surprising to hear eight points of view that is so obvious which is like of course we want one tool where the data was interconnected why do you think people um why do you think more people don't try that to have unified tools and UniFi data underneath I think people try for different angles like even fairly recently there's this thing called NOCO right NOCO is like coming from this kind of like power user developer angle of wouldn't be nice everybody can modify this underlying software they use every day that's one angle that it wasn't coming from the angle of the the knowledge and data wants to be in one place right and language model sort of give another angle the underlying knowledge in the bending space wants to be one place wouldn't be nice in one place right and the macro is also coming from the uh the budget place wouldn't be nice rather than pay for five different vendors and all C based business just to pay one vendor and save some money so they have different angles from different times um I would say we are more come from this kind of computing and medium and literacy angle like you and me go through school to learn how to read and write know English and Chinese we spent years to do that we all know how to do that the world the same MacBook for most people are are very rich as I more like a machine to do typew writing or watching YouTube uh not much more beyond that it's not very creative right um wouldn't be more nice that more people can use their software more creatively right because there's a separation be between people who can make software and people who use software that's why sf's rent is so expensive because we're the modern day Detroit or Manchester right we're the factory of the world um Notions largely come from that angle which is the original angle we were inspired by early Computing Pioneer they thought about that angle right they thought about Computing could just be like literacy one day everybody can do it I guess they didn't expect AI might make that even give a really interesting twist to it because now language model AI can not only to create software but also do a lot of thinking working for you so the future is pretty interesting no so for someone who thinks on you know um span of like Decades of you know what should Computing look like and what were um what were the most ambitious plans for personal Computing you know uh three four decades ago like what are you most excited about seeing from AI broadly over the next decade I think 34 decad is bit too long if AGI happen that time like Computing might not be necessary for this decade I think a one sleeper category is the the drag thing embedding space the de case might be too long we're saying the next next year or two now the language model can understand what you put into a computer understanding so rather than you to the organization to make you retrieval retrieve the understanding more easily machine can do that better than anybody else can right so before that uh we use keyword-based search where you find your coworker who remember that that cue where does that information sit now just ask notion Ai and you get that in second so that's one I'm personally really excited about I think not enough people talk about it and of course the other one is like the agent the workflow side that that's has a lot of buzs already so that's interesting too you and Simon uh you said bet the company on AI and are you know have real conviction and as you are building out the team like um what does the talent look like you like have or need to make um notion and AI first company and I kind of argue you folks are one of the earliest adop of AI at scale as an application so part of the question in some sense is you built so many interesting things like what are the people that you now need to sort of build the next level stuff in addition to what you already have on the team in early days kind of just Bo Force slim is really good thing k a lot of thing and learned really quickly right I would say notion is a company where largely people interested in interface and design a lot of full stack front then heavy folks and back and people who scale we have somewhat a small team of search but we don't have too too many ml folks almost nothing and in at least my learning our learning in the past year or so building for AI is okay you m Mo folks are important it's kind of like you no longer do a this deterministic thing that you can see how it works it's almost like a I don't bake but feels like a baking right you have to like do something get the thing ingredients ready run through rinse press the button and wait for a while and see does it come up it's a different way different sense of patience and different type of personality to do that well a lot of massaging a lot of preparing my friends call that probalistic software engineering kind of like I think it's it's morphed into this sort of stochastic world or at least partially stochastic yeah so one is like maybe gardening feels like that way I don't Garden either uh so that's category people are to to me is pretty necessary the other category is like people who are curious and learn really fast right it's like okay um like the group of promp like language prompt engineer language model sort of make everybody like a a real time machine learn learning engineer you just prompt write then you can get your stuff right and there's a lot of trick and techniques uh um and how does that plug into user interface uh I think this category of people call AI engineer or something there's an terminology form they tend to be pretty young they tend to be like we have someone like under drinking age working ocean uh they they fit into that bucket and I think both seems to work quite well um we don't have too many researchers and notion that's another one I think uh um will be important but we're fundamentally sit in the application layer so it's more about apply side of things more manipulating the models and making sure you can scale them to like user outcomes and things about that and another part is like the scaling part right how do you scale to like tens of millions 100 million users it's bit it's a problem on its own to it's beyond just a demo on Twitter right It's Tricky no yeah so you have often said that uh notion is less a productivity company than an application Building Company how do you think about the initial use case and like how what makes you believe people want to build more application I don't think people want to build more applications what got me started in notion got I started in notion it's um last year college I read a paper by uh one of the Computing Pioneers Douglas angelar and he talked about his papers name augmenting human intellect so every day we use software today is very much like application when you go into one application do one thing but for that generation of computing people in the 60 70 80s computers are a lot more software are a lot more malleable you can actually Tinker it modify right small talk you can go into and change the how operating system work on the Fly um that really inspired me like today people software are so rigid can we create a new breed of software that people can modify can and can change and customize and bring back some original esos of those early Computing Pioneers that's why we started notion um the hard lesson for us is like like you mentioned most people don't want to create software they don't wake up said hey I want to create my perfect project management tool my project perfect knowledge base they boss ask for something they just have to get the work done right um so the in some sense our learning and pivot is instead of giving people those um software building tool we have to package the software building blocks together as ready to use templates as ready to use use cases then people can adopt really quickly so you were one of the earliest adopters of AI in terms of appc with any real scale and I think it's impressive how quickly noan ended up starting to work in this area how do you think about how that impacts different aspects of what you built and what you're building going forward and how does that impact that vision of saying okay we have this um this effective platform that allows people to both interact with uh documents or core use cases in simple ways add things like calendar but then also go in very interesting directions in terms of both a set of applications and templates they can use yeah I think we're lucky like I mentioned we're not trying to build specific use cases right we're trying to build a Lego bricks that power those use cases um what are those Lego bricks text editing is a one fundamental Lego bricks most software have that piece relational database a table is one fundamental Lego bricks right um different form of permission commenting so we've been spent five plus years building those Lego bricks and feels like boom AI just jumps in almost like a brand new car engine and can power those Lego braks in brand new ways uh so feels very lucky in that way and that because we've been building those Lego bricks and refining those allow us to ship features uh pluging with AI really quickly we one of the earlier one to launch AI writing for productivity software at scale because we've been spent years building a text editor uh we can do uh AI power database table features really quickly because we've been building a relational databases um we've been building a knowledge base for a long time so we launch AI Q&A really quickly fairly quickly uh the rack system on top of oce because we have those Lego breaks uh so in some sense kind of like at just right moment right time for us right how did you um begin to like resource and prioritize this effort because you're like ah magic we have this engine it applies for our Lego bricks um and then he started shipping pretty quickly but I think there are a lot of organizations right now trying to figure out what to do with AI and so you know in terms of like designing the features prioritizing that effort versus everything you're already doing and a rapidly growing software company yeah I think I had the conviction my co-founder Simon actually they all had the conviction um funny because we all live in the mission right and openi initially still is in the mission and uh some of my friends especially Simon's friends work at open remember we go to their office they during the DOTA days they like what is this company doing kind of interesting and Simon and some people in notion saw early that most gpts like what is this thing spin out text sometimes gibberish sometimes useful um I personally I have to admit I slept on it on on gpt3 even saw gpt3 feels like what is this thing useful for it's like yes for marketing for Content writing Crea first draft didn't really click for me um personally for me was uh fortunate enough to start early preview gbd4 and that's like oh wow this thing can think it can reason it can know how to do things has this little bit workflow power to it that's a big a heart for me and like it just give me it personally give me so much conviction like this is going to change everything if you think about what knowledge work is in right why do we use software fundamentally SAS software is all we all in the same information people paper pushing activity right it's like a piece of paper coming in front of you a human like change a couple bits push to another human Lang model can do some form of this now so uh so that just like give me the conviction like this going to completely change everything we do with a computer and after that we sort of just bet the company on it uh like we're lucky enough to have those Lego breaks and then what come which legal breaks can works well with AI which doesn't we're trying to figure that out who inside a company are good with this technology we have search but it's not like we don't have a lot of ml folks so need to hire more ml folks need to get people inside a company to have similar convictions so we can move in the same direction it's quite interesting it's kind of like so must dinosaur feels like when Astro hit the earth and like what do they do there yeah yeah there's a lot of change coming for sure it's a lot of change yeah what do you think is missing from the capability set because to your point I think a lot of people weren't really thinking about AI too much until chat GPT and gp4 came out and there was a period of time where three and then 3.5 and you started to see the capabilities incrementing up and entirely new businesses are suddenly able enabled with each sort of step with the next GPT level model you know GPT 5 or de your point rag adds a lot of capabilities what are the biggest missing gaps for you to take full advantage of this technology is it future reasoning is it better uh thinking and knowledge like what's the yeah I think all about that above to me it feels like technology is fun we're in the tech business technology is fundamentally about tradeoffs right it's like the plastic can do things that wood cannot do and we discover plastic and then we figure out new things we can bottle water like this before you cannot bottle water with a wood table right so um all of a sudden we have this thing called language model you have a new characteristic that deterministic software cannot do in the past and and we don't really know how it's made fully so every month every week if you're on Twitter people discover new techniques to get more out of this and for companies entrepreneurs they're also making tra off discover what how the market react to this capabilities of this new W this new language model and so it's a constant evolutional cycle happening really really fast right now right um I think if with that mindset uh what are the dimensions um on the technical side on the technology side itself yes the model gets larger context Windows more reasoning better speed smaller footprint um those are all great like like for notion uh to power the work force I would really need like we learn like gp4 is smart a cloud to a Smart we need that intelligent to do reasoning or for a tech summarization cheap fasts better right that's the technology side and in my opinion there's so much about human behavior as well just like inertia in in our personal Behavior companies risk tolerance and that's slowly evolving as well right like like what Steve Jobs always was talk about you cannot make something too new you have to be largely the same and change one thing and two thing right virtual Appo the off white guys is like 3% difference just push the boundary so people can accept it but still also new right to me it feels like language model power application are kind of in the same pH if it's too different people like what do they do with it right such alien Behavior it has to rag is pretty nice because the larg the existing Behavior but better output right can you describe the um the Q&A product for people who have an experience right essentially everything you put in notion notion help you remember right and this is not just apply to notion pretty apply to most rack systems like why do we use computer when you to store things I need to recall things before language model and rack the recall largely happen based on keywords right you the keyword has to be precise or there's some lexical Tech tricks you can like recall easily um uh imprecisely what rack happens language model can actually understand what you're put into there so you no longer need to organize your information in notion whatever you throw in there you can find it later what that means is for a person or for a company for a team you can have perfect memory and not only have Perfect Memory the the right piece of information if we design our software right can push to the right person at the right time right that's probably more than 50% knowledge work right we're still perfecting the system I think we're one of the first on the market that apply a skill we still have a some somewhat a waiting list because it's hard to do this at scale still um but for a company for a team before search one of a weaker point but with rack you completely change that I changed how I use notion I can just ask a question to notion like um how large when I removing out of the SF office to a new office and someone in the company wrote in some documents I don't have to Ping five different three different people to find the answers if it's in notion we'll find it for me right um everyday Engineers designers operation people just keep asking each other on slack or in email such a question each question is 10 minutes writing the answers 20 minutes to find answers and there's a delay in the Middle with notion Q&A you can completely cut that right into in seconds we're just at the beginning of what rack can do for work it's pretty amazing I feel like Rag and edings are very under discussed or underappreciated in some sense relative to the impact they really seem to be having or starting to have and I think notion um Q&A is a great example of that I guess the other thing that you folks just launched is calendaring and if you can't talk about it or if there's nothing to talk about that's fine too but um I feel like one of the really interesting things that people are talking increasingly about is agents and sort of the agentic world and there's a lot of capabilities missing to really make those valuable but in the can context of a calendaring application you could think of all sorts of ways that having AI act on your behalf or help understand things can be incredibly valuable and so I curious how you think about the application of AI relative to calendar versus you know some of the core um information related things that you just talked about maybe we can group AI stuff into like at least in my mental model it's the rack the knowledge information retrieval is one bucket knowledge bucket then there is this workflow bucket right use the word agent uh um that's in that bucket CER somewhat in that bucket um why do we need to meet why do we need Canada because we need to meet and we need to schedule time we need to figure out exchange some kind of bits between my brain to your brain right um can that bit can that exchange be done by a language model maybe and can the meeting time be done by scheduling be done that's like a baby step right um and most things we do has this kind of time Dimension to it uh can language model help us shuffling our schedule yeah it feels like there's also the information retrieval piece of it because you know if my calendar autop populated everything I need to know about the meeting or the people attending or other things that's incredibly valuable as a user of a calendar and so I just feel like there's a lot of these things that kind of tieen together both in terms of the coordination which you mentioned and the workflow and then separate from that there's just what do I know about this the calendar part it's the simpler part of the workflow like the holy grills kind of like can just the agents robots do all our knowledge work for us right it's a really interesting framing that I didn't have before of a bunch of the work you're doing at notion actually eating into like communication right it's it's sort of obvious in retrospect but like if you look at what you describe like like am I really going to slack back and forth about this thing about you know when we're moving if I can just know I'm in oce help me know or with calendaring like you know the most intelligent version of it is like well do I need to have that meeting or can you tell me what I was going to tell me I know like why do you need to communicate because there's something the work cannot be done asynchronously or by the software itself right then that's why you talk uh yeah it's kind of interesting maybe it's interesting question like are we kind to communicate more or less with language model I probably feel it's probably less uh uh the agent side essentially bet on language model that's the communication one question I have for you just going back to like the implication of rag and like you can be my brain and do my Organization for me um like what if my brain is really disorganized like do you do you think that uh this changes the amount of work people should do in systems like notion at input right like you know should I be designing my knowledge base in the same structured way or can of just dump it all in stream of Consciousness in theut I think organization might be we might be moving away from the organizational world world why do you need to organize because you can retrieve why do you have index like index initially are file cabinets and little IND are sitting on top of so you can find things quickly right and they index based on certain uh names or certain Dimensions but edding and rag sort you just you have in semantically connection of all the thing you throw into this file bag and you can find bring it out however you like so I think we might be moving past the need for organization uh that's really liberating that means on my phone imagine this experience I'll have a new idea I see a whiteboard behind me I just take a picture or write something dump it and notion going to organize for you right so that's then that's become my perfect memory to start later could be my perfect assistant to help me do something with this knowledge and that's the vision we're moving towards right that's super exciting to me so you are um this is a question from h m foral you've been long time friends with you know you are a student of History you mentioned duck angelart earlier I know um you think about you know the transition in terms of like Alan K and what he did in terms of simplifying any of those concepts for like a broader audience around Computing Vernon's question was what lessons in history do you take that um inform your point of view of like how to treat AI strategy with notion now like from a prior revolution in Computing you know how does it help you decide what to do a lot is intuition I think understand understand history give you a sense of History doesn't repeat itself but Rhymes so like okay which phase are we in um I personally think we're sort of in this kind of bundling phase like um um who said this like there's only two way to do business bundling un bundling right and uh actually the during the breakouts reading a uh Chinese novel uh Romance of three kingdoms and the opening sentence of for that it's uh the Empire long divided must unite long United must divide that's has always been business is the same way too right um we're in the bundling phase I would say the stas it's sort of this unboundly fragmentation phase if we Trace back to SAS why is SAS happening in the late 2 mid 2000s before that everything's running on Microsoft that was a bundling phase early days at PC there's so many different applications the first version of the the World Star World perfect different text editors dbas different database software the funny fact of dbase is like they start with dbas 2 because there's so many company go bus that it sounds like if they start with dbas 2 people has more credibility it feels like this this product has been around for a while so that's the 80s '90s was this kind of bundling phase because Microsoft has OS layer on the line yeah and the sad is because the web becomes good enough to run software right then so then we have this un bundling phase a fragmentation phase and then with the the last 10 15 years it easy really the money is cheap easy to create company there's there's so much too much now feels like there's like information so fragmented and now the new technology happening is AI language model and if you build more with it or just think more with it language model wants information to be one place wants the end points to be connected so it's easier to is it hard enough to at current version of language model do do what you want but imagine talk with different endpoint that's even harder right so and so we're in the bundling phase because the macro but we're also in the bundling phase because language model I believe wants the things to be together think makes sense I also feel like we're in the bundling phase because the nature of how Founders think about their businesses shifted how so um I think that uh it's interesting because I remember I don't know 10 years ago I used to argue with people about oh you should really buy other companies or integrate or sort of pull all these things together and in consumer that actually happened right like Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and other things and they effectively created like a bundle of social products that they could cross use in different ways for distribution or other things but I feel like what happened is we had a series of Highly technical Founders because we shifted in the Facebook era from Cheryl becoming CEO to coo and you went from business Centric uh CEO in the 90s in some cases although there's people like Bill Gates who learned and adopted as technologist to very technology and product Riven Founders who often thought no matter what product I build it always has to be better and so I I can't just think of distribution as my wedge I need to think of every product as being Superior and so I'm not going to build certain things and now I feel like people are both building great products as well as bundling them but also they're much more aggressive about saying it can be 80% is good it could be 50% is good but I'm going to have a bundle and that's HubSpot and that's Rippling and they have very high quality to their products it's just they realize they don't need every single edge case and every feature as long as they're able to cross sell yeah I think the YC school's philosophy of build one thing use internet to find the distribution that was I think overlap quite a bit with the rise of internet right and and feels like there's a value to create on the other dimension which is like you mentioned it doesn't have to be as good 90% that's good but because the Synergy of things just make a lot easier a lot cheaper less tabs you open your browser yeah it's all integrated you have the information flow or or the system of record for whatever thing that you're dealing with yeah I think a lot of people also just um perhaps lack that uh sort of historical context right if you look at the strategy of company is like horrible right it was very much for a decade and a half like a dominant at least commercially attitude of like okay we're going to buy the second best product in this additional software category we want to be in and then sell the heck out of it worked great right actually because um was very hard for customers to deploy these things or there're just advantages to everything being attached to a single database at some point and I I do think there is some analogy to as you said language models because having things in the same edting space is very useful very useful yeah I think there's bundling of distribution and bundling of information the what you're describing to me is more of Microsoft more like bundling of distribution langu wants the bundling of data bundling information so I remember hearing from Dylan at figma early on that there was um one crazy user who was in the product like 14 hours a day it was you um early on in the uh notion Journey um being really design obsessed I think the company has a reputation for that do you think of notion as like a design Centric company and um is it important how do you scale it I think depends on what you mean by design design is to us at least to me it's less about how it looks is how the system plug together right and then in that case the trade off you make do you centralize that thing or do you decentralize that thing um certain company work well or certain business of product work well being decentralized like operation heavy company could work that way and notion like I mentioned we're sort of in the bundling business our value provided having this one information space one works space for people do all different kind of things so things need to be work well together it's almost building notion it feels like building an operating system building a programming language right you don't you don't you don't Farm out to like 50 people to design a programming language you programming language are done by one person so that means the design here is very much centralized energy so kind of like apple how they build OS integrated with their hardware and right like what is the Apple for software doesn't quite exist today right it truly doesn't quite exist so that's what I'm interested in what we're interested in so in that case means to build a good product a good customer user experience we need to think things more horizontally more holistically that means the decision- making tend to be centralized in or design team or like tend to be centralized right so um less like more so more Apple like less Amazon like it's funny cuz when I first met you it was just you starting notion and it before you brought on Simon and and you talked about things that way even then and I felt that one of the reasons I was lucky enough to invest or you know I I came on board was because you had such a cohesive view of how you wanted to build software and you had such a cohesive design aesthetic and it was your mock but it was also how you were dressed and how that reflected into the product I felt like it was extremely striking you know like you're one of a very small number of people I've ever seen where that design aesthetic has just kind of permeated everything in a very cohesive way and so that's one of the things that got me excited at the time I was like wow this is capturing a uh aesthetic that could be an incredible product platform but you also talked about things even then I remember in terms of like okay what's the what's the cohesive Apple like thing that you can do for software things so I think it's kind of amazing to see that consistent thread so I was just stricken while you were talking you know by that yeah thank you yeah like I study cognitive system cognitive science which is kind of just like a degree for everything in some sense it's like a little bit philosophy a little bit l State computer science I learned how to Cod when I was a kid and I did a lot of Art and also in school so like try not to like there's so many things you can steal from all of different places right and it's like the Bund are sort of man-made and in notion was most our designer can call majority of 80% of our designer can call because the moment you can as a designer or as engineer you can Cod or you can design you can make really interesting tradeoffs right at the end of the day Technologies at least in my opinion is about trade-offs what kind of trade-off you can make that unlock new user behaviors that's valuable but if you can do more things you can more make more interest and trade off the other people cannot make as a designer if you can code you know how to change your design to make easier to build as engineer if you can design you can like do the same thing almost like squeeze the air bubble to whichever direction is easier to squeeze right um and therefore I think being more holistic help at least notion as a company energy we're trying to be holistic also help our keep our company team very small like we're usually one of the smallest relative to our business scale because people can think can do more can be more holistic and people enjoy that too because they can do more things it doesn't feels like they have one role they have to be doing that repeatedly has a lot of different benefits but it's much harder to find such people and important question here please so if I think about the first office and this may or may not be uh true still um no is a no shoes was a no shoes place did this contribute to the company energy I'm Asian so when you go home you take off your shoes our first office no shoes lasts us to 10ish people second office 20ish people no shoes third of us no shoes it actually has heated floor so even better oh very those all in the mission and the fourth office we try to do no shoes still in the mission um I think I made a wrong choice in the rock the rock kind of hard when you it's a h based Rock so when you step on it without shoes with socks only it's just all hurts so we decide not to do no shoes at forth office and uh so far has been stuck that way yeah P intuition has socks and uh slippers at the front so that way if you need the padding I know but then where the question is like where do you store your slippers it become stinky like it's aesthetic yes if you come to our office it's like we're still try to be um not corporate it's like they we're trying to use the furniture that people use for homes I'm pretty picky about what kind of furniture is in office like ideally designed classic that last 50 plus years so Inspire us to build software that way right so they made they also made trade-offs people who design a chair make t they made really interesting trade off Force to solve certain problems if you know the history of it so we try to in the office use good software good chairs good lighting so this back to the aesthetic point that I made earlier I actually felt that in the offices as well there's that ongoing cohesion even the music I remember I think it was in the second office was it was always jazz in the background and I just felt like it all kind of was this consistent Vibe you know so it's pretty cool within notion are you using a singular um underlying l l or are you at this point using multiple different things for different use cases you mentioned sort of the highle reasoning versus the fast Jeep sort of synthesis we try everything open air and Tropic um are the high-end model uh we want reasoning which is we work with the high-end model right uh yeah it's kind of like everybody building different flavors of this MH so yeah makes sense and then as you look at um it feels like with no there's a set of core sort of templates or use cases um you know there's things around project management there's other types of almost like applications that people have built to use there's knowledge based related stuff there's the things that you mentioned um are any of those you feel differentially impacted in terms of how you think about future AI R map or things that you know will really change the game dramatically in terms of some of these areas yeah I would say rack changed all the knowledge say fundamentally um you no longer need to organize so the notion one of thing people love is the life sidebar right the life sidebar you can organize your knowledge base organize your personal workspace maybe the future doesn't have to have that like what it's like to um you know not fall into your own Innovative Dilemma to double down that your ex Paradigm but just having a notion that you can just dump things and retrieve right that's knowledge sty that's actually really interesting at a high level to think that um everything sort of moves to a form of search over time move over to search over time like you're kind of losing organ you don't need to self-organize information anymore no in this new world you can just create a mechanism to interrogate it yeah at least like you you don't organize your brain you just dump into it then you wake up all you remember that thing right so like it's interesting some people do like the the art of lowkey the art of memory you actually or visualize your brain but for most people it just works without any organization and magically right what is like for software we're getting there right yeah it's kind of fun are there um areas of uh software more broadly that you think are outside of notion scope that you think are going to change a great deal from AI wow um in some sense it's kind of a race there's like the we're in the B Notions in the bundling business where are um we are uh we're in the bundling and front office business front office my definition our definition is what's happening in like imagine a 1960s office right what's in 1960 office on your desk you have a notepad you write on something you maybe have a typewriter um then you have your binders on the left and right to that's essentially the notepad is your documents your notes and notion your binders of things are like your weeky knowledge based in notion and behind you will be the file cabinet that's your relational datab is in Ocean right and you have a little push card to put thing into there then there's a back office whereas like the Librarians organize all the things and that's snowflake right that's the back in the days IBM we don't touch that uh we largely touch our strength like I mentioned is software interface UI ux which is largely what's in front of the human we're trying to bundle in this in one space at the same time there's also largely back office power use cases they tend to be vertic cides specific to Health Care specific to some kind of workflows very specific by very essential to store somewhere and the vertical integrate that use cases uh that could be aifi too and people in fact we see this in law we see this in a bunch very specialized thing that people have that domain knowledge and trying to figure out how do you um instead of human shuffling this let language model help a lot of that right um the front office type of things it's kind of open-ended the back office power things tend to be specific so I think it will be a race but the market is just so large and it doesn't it's not Zero Sum necessarily maybe you can talk about the market as you see it for notion so you know when you guys began I think early adopter startups were the first to um get onto notion for knowledge base um you're a much bigger company now we're also in a different macro where um you know startup budgets are are uh less robust like how do you think about the Enterprise and helping the Enterprise adopt AI or or you know do Knowledge Management yeah we're still very uh early uh not at scale yet um I would say uh bundling in trans do a lot of good things one is you don't have to jump between different tabs to do things second is save your cost right like we save a lot of customers bills for their project management Tool uh around their issue tracking tool and and that's Enterprise really care about that it's the very CFO friendly today um with this macro so yeah spond only has many good benefits besides M besides information there is also money well Ian I mean this conversation has spent so many interesting topics thanks so much for joining us today thank you yeah great to see you good to see you find us on Twitter at no prior pod subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces follow the show on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen that way you get a new episode every week and sign up for emails 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